


The Wolf Queen

by ishafel



Category: The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2007, Yuletide New Year's Resolutions Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 23:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1282648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sun still rises, though the lions have gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wolf Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/gifts).



This is not how she imagined it, from the stories they told her. This is not how she imagined Silvenes of the khalifs, that once was the pride of Al-Rassan. It is a ruin, they told her, a fragment of a poem, beautiful and sad. She has dreamed of that Silvenes, that was the jewel of the khalifate. She has dreamed of the khalifs, tall, dark and stern men in gleaming armor, white stallions with long braided manes, swords with rubies set in the hilts, silks in every color. Every manner of decadence. They were her mother's stories, her uncle Alvar's; she wonders now if they ever saw Silvenes, before it fell, before the Muwardis fired the city to keep it from the king of Valledo.

In this Silvenes there are no arches, no fountains, no music, no bright, brittle words, no fallen stones twined with ivy. No Starborn. This Silvenes is the capital of united Esperaña, a new city at the heart of a new empire. There is nothing of poetry here, no room for beauty. This is no place for lions, even the lions the khalifs kept in chains when Al-Rassan spanned the continent and the followers of Jad were exiled in the hard, cold North. There is a line she remembers, from a poem her mother loves--"Wolves are seen by white moonlight." Impossible to imagine anything so romantic, so lovely and lonesome, as wolves, or moonlight, here in Silvenes that is. The city they are building is so new the mortar between the stones gleams in the sun, square and practical and intensely ugly.

"It isn't what I expected," she says, and she has to work to keep from sounding petulant.

Her father smiles at her, distant and kind. It isn't her he's seeing, it's the past, Silvenes of the khalifs, in the time of the lions. A world that ended before she was born. "No, I don't expect it would be. It's very like Esteren, if that helps--Ramiro's city in Valledo."

She has never seen Esteren, either. But she remembers, for the first time that morning, that her father is the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan. He father was one of the lions, once. This means something to him, something she cannot even imagine, seeing Silvenes this way. Isobel ibn Khairan has considered herself a woman grown since the day she turned eighteen, but all at once she feels far younger. All at once she wishes her mother were there, to chase away the old sorrow she sees in her father's eyes.

They ride the rest of the way in silence, each of them mourning for a city thirty years gone and more, a city that was never more than a dream. At the gates of the palace, her father turns in the saddle to dismiss their men. Before they ride on, he turns his horse hard against hers, so that they are face to face, their knees pressed together. "Isobel," he says, and she steadies her mare, looks up at him. "You are very sure this is what you want?"

She is not, in fact, sure. She would like nothing more than to go home, to be a little girl again, leaning against his knee, or Uncle Alvar's, listening to them talk about the past, their scarred fingers gentle on her hair. She would like nothing more than to hide her face in her mother's skirts, and never again make a decision of any importance.

She is her mother's daughter, as much as her father's. She lifts her chin. "It's too late to turn back now," she says. "They don't scare me, anyway." It is their private code, one to which neither the twins, nor her mother are privy. This time, though, he doesn't smile.

"There is no shame in being afraid of this, Isobel," he says. "Say the word, and we turn back." 

She has never thought of him as an assassin, or a general, or even a poet. He is her father. He writes dry, overly scholarly treatises on the history of Al-Rassan. He is the one she and her brothers went to, with small troubles and large. Only, looking at him now she is reminded that before she was born he was someone else entirely. Someone as much dangerous as brilliant, someone who earned the scars he bears on the battlefield. Someone who would not be worried at the possibility of offending the king of Esperaña, the most powerful man on the peninsula.

"No," she says. "Never that."

"You're very like your mother sometimes," he says, and it is not a compliment. 

Ramiro's guards open the gate for them. She rides through, head high. Her mother is a Kindath doctor, and her father is an Asherite historian, and she is here to marry one of the Horsemen of Jad: the son of the king. She owes it to her gods--all of her gods--to do it proudly.

They are waiting, of course. Not the king himself, but Prince Alejo, Queen Ines, the king's chancellor and his wife, and a dozen other courtiers. They are kind, though they all talk at once and her Esperañan, which is mediocre, fails her. Her father translates for her when she runs out of words.

There is a woman, in the courtyard, who knew her father a long time ago. Miranda Belmonte, who had been married to a man her father loved, and killed. She is old, as old as the queen, and older than Isobel's mother, but she is still beautiful. Watching them together, her father's careful gallantry, the Dona's fight to hold back tears, she is reminded of the letter this woman sent the day Al-Rassan fell.

She looks away, surprises the prince, who is staring at her. He is very handsome, very fair. She has met him before. He came to Sorenica to court her. She is, after all, the flower of the Kindath. She does not love him, but that does not mean she never will. And someday she will be queen, here in Silvenes, where once the khalifs reigned. She will be queen of Esperaña, and the Horsemen of Jad and the Kindath and the Starborn will be finally, and truly, at peace. She cannot be a lion among lions, but she will be a wolf among wolves.


End file.
